Voice Dream Scanner vs Kurzweil 1000

I have been struggling with reading my mail and other correspondence recently. For many years I would just ask others to read my letters and post but as I have been exploring more and more assistive technology options I feel I cancan and should be more independent.

I learned about Voice Dream Scanner from a friend who told me to just dive right in and give it a go. Despite having tried several apps that do a similar job of scanning a document and then reading it back, most were either fiddly toto work or just didn’t come up with the best of results.

As I am in the fortunate position to have Kurzweil 1000 which I tend to use for scanning and other longer form materials, I would often resort to that. But for a quick read of a letter from the hospital or a credit card bill, I didn’t want to have to pull out the scanner, dust it off and set up the laptop just to do that. So I thought I would try it out and compareKurzweil 1000 to Voice Dream Scanner, bearing in mind that K1000 costs around £1000 and the Voice Dream Scanner app costs less than a tenner!Listen to my thoughts and experience and comment.

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I am an absolute geek who loves technology. I also happen to be severely sight impaired and that has meant my journey with new technology has been challenging. What I've learnt is what I want to share with others and I do that on air in the UK on RNIB Connect Radio's weekly Tech Talk radio show and podcast, and on AMI-Audio's Double Tap Canada radio show and podcast. I'm also a very lucky husband and the owner of the world's coolest dog!

The text find feature for longer documents on the computer seems invaluable for finding specific sections of text I have to say, and having to control for light levels and scanning surface contrast with the phone is just an extra point of failure.
Plus, scanning multi page documents is a pain using the phone without a special stand, and I haven’t found one that serves my needs yet personally.

That said, the phone setup is still gonna be much cheaper over all, especially if your phone is on a contract, though your more likely to get a computer with preloaded scanner and screen reader paid for by what ever organization than a phone as well.
And there is just no good replacement for the on the go aspect of voice dream. If I want to read a menu or handout somewhere, I’m not going to bring my laptop with a portable USB flatbed scanner everywhere with me to do it.

IMHO they are still just useful for different things, but it’s great that some of the smartphone apps have gotten good enough to use for tasks traditionally left to flatbed scanners if you have no choice, especially for people without easy access to government assistance or in countries with trade restrictions/terrible exchange rates.

Your Voice Dream Scanner vs Kurzweil 1000 review was seriously misleading. Windows PCs are widely found in homes and offices. They cannot be defined as specialized for this reason. While less common flatbed scanners are also widely available and used by non-disabled people. Scanners are ubiquitously available and cheap. For these reasons you cannot define them as specialized. This means that the Kurzweil 1000 software is the only part that you can define as specialized on the system that you demonstrated.

Please tell me how Voice Dream Scanner is not specialized software comparable to Kurzweil 1000. Both use widely available hardware to perform a task unique to blind users.

You also seriously misrepresent the difference in navigation. Your failure to use control-right-arrow to navigate to the phone number once you were on the right line means that people miss how much more efficient navigation is in Kurzweil 1000. The superior efficiency of Kurzweil 1000 also applies to editing functions like copying text.

This was a good demo. I keep wondering if I should download the dream scanner this demo may have influenced my decision. The tricky thing about phone based scanners is aligning them to the written text. It can get so frustrating at times. Before smart phones and apps I read a good deal of books at my public library using kurzweil. In addition I believe there are many more features in Kurzweil

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